Accelerating the journey to S/4 HANA

You would be hard-pressed to find a SAP customer who does not have the migration to S/4 HANA in the forefront of his mind. Companies are undertaking this journey at their own pace and many organisations are at different stages of that transformation. With the 2027 deadline looming, it’s high time to step up the pace to avoid getting cut off of maintenance of the platform. A solid quality assurance strategy is key in making it to the finish line in time.

The pros and cons of an S/4 HANA migration

Reading the magazines and websites of SAP user groups around the world, it is clear that many SAP users are not undertaking the migration wholeheartedly. They realise the effort will be time-consuming and is loaded with complexity. Over the years, organisations have added custom code to their SAP instances and now face the daunting task of reviewing or rewriting these additions when they move from an on-premise implementation to the cloud.

However, the migration does bring multiple benefits. For starters, it provides companies with the opportunity to come clean with all these customisations. In reality, many of these bespoke additions are no longer in use and might as well be left behind.

S/4 HANA also brings additional benefits: the in-memory database offers real-time analytics, improved performance and enhanced capabilities. A modern and intuitive user interface boosts productivity by optimising the user experience. S/4 HANA comes with advanced technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, Internet of Things, offering businesses the potential to innovate faster. And by using the migration as an opportunity to review and simplify business processes, organisations will be able to operate with greater agility.

How can I speed up the migration from ECC to S/4 HANA?

Patience is a virtue, but there are more reasons to accelerate the journey to S/4 HANA than reasons to stall. Here are some ways in which you can speed up the cycle:

1. Build an integrated plan

If it is true that Abraham Lincoln once said “"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe," he would make the perfect project manager for an S/4 HANA migration. Preparation is everything when it comes to such a huge undertaking, and sometimes you may want to invest some time first and start slower – enabling you to move faster afterwards. So start by thinking about the aim of the migration, how will it support the strategic goals of the company? What are the most important business processes? Ensure you have all these answers when you build a plan. And only move forward once the integrated plan has been approved by all the stakeholders.

2. Involve the business, early on

A SAP implementation is there to support the business and all the business-critical processes inside an organisation. Sooner or later, the migration will appear on the agenda of the business leaders in that organisation. By involving them from the start, you can build critical alignment between business and IT, and avoid rework because senior management does not agree with the path that you are taking. By involving business from the start, you will get their buy-in and you will save valuable time.

3. Shift left and move faster

Traditionally, much of the quality assurance process comes late in the project, and the people who get to use the system will only be confronted with it at the very last moment, when User Acceptance Testing is scheduled. For a couple of years already, it has become best practice to start testing early on, a practice that has been dubbed ‘shift-left’ testing. The advantages of testing early are manifold: it will help you detect defects earlier, eliminating rework, and driving down costs. At the same time, by moving UAT forward, you will gain more confidence with the users. User confidence is a great asset to change management and helps reduce resistance to change.

4. Automate your testing

Migrating all applications, all data, all interfaces, all integrations… is a mammoth undertaking and there is simply no way that you can perform all quality assurance tasks by manual testing alone. Both TTC and SAP recommend automating the testing process, either by using Tricentis Test Automation (TTA) which is part of SAP Enterprise Support, or by investing in SAP Enterprise Continuous Testing (ECT) by Tricentis, which offers more functionality than TTA and also supports non-SAP technologies. These tools come recommended by SAP (ECT is part of SAP’s Solution Extension portfolio) but, of course, customers are free to choose any other solution, including open source tools. Test automation reduces testing cost and time and guarantees faster feedback cycles, while also offering more scalability, maximising test coverage and allowing more test case reuse. In my experience, the more mature a quality assurance department is, the more they use test automation.

5. Start with the end in mind

When you build your integrated plan, you know that assuring the quality of S/4 HANA does not stop after the migration. There are sure to be changes because the business requires them, or because new projects are started. This means you will also need to set up regression tests to ensure these changes have no impact on other parts of the application. Besides these business-driven changes, organisations will also receive regular maintenance updates and upgrades that also require immediate testing. By taking this into account early in the process, this will save you valuable time in the long run.

6. Don’t test too much

This may seem like a counterintuitive thing for a testing consultancy to say, but there is no need to test everything all the time. Of course, you will continually test your key business workflows, for instance your month-end, quarter-end or year-end closing. These need to be part of your regression test pack. But there are less important processes that do not require constant testing. Of the thousand tests in your regression pack, there may be 20 tests that are crucial and 980 that do not require daily attention. Using a tool like LiveCompare (called Change Impact Analysis in the SAP catalog) helps u decide what areas in S/4 HANA may be most at risk and merit testing efforts the most.

7. Get an experienced, independent, impartial view

There are many moving parts in an S/4 HANA integration. Not from a technical perspective, but also from a human point of view. A failed migration will have huge business consequences, so you need to get things right from the first time. And this is where a consultancy like TTC Global comes in. We have plenty of experience with SAP, with the Tricentis tools that SAP favors and we have a laser-sharp focus on just one thing: quality assurance. As an external expert, we can bring all stakeholders together and ensure a good business/IT alignment as we speak the language of both these groups inside your organisation. We will not only work with all the internal stakeholders, but also with other third parties that you are working with. By getting us on board from the start, we can help build that integrated plan based on the best practices that have been tested and proven in previous projects.